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CHARLESTON, WV - NOVEMBER 02: Democratic U.S. Senate candidate and West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin celebrates during a election night victory party November 2, 2010 in Charleston, West Virginia. Manchin has won the senate seat that was held by the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) by defeating Republican challenger John Raese. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

King Coal’s rule is coming to end. But should its status as an energy leader be preserved or should it be tossed aside? It’s a question now getting pursued by key Democratic U.S. Senators who say that the latest federal pronouncement would bury the coal sector.

At issue is a provision of the 1990 Clean Air Act called the “New Source Performance Standards,” which dictate the level of pollutants that can be released from power plants. The Environmental Protection Agency has strengthened the mandates to essentially require coal be as clean as natural gas, which is a tough feat given that the former releases about twice the emissions as the latter.

The ruling, which was released in April 2012 and which will become effective on January 1, 2015, will certainly get litigated. Big coal will argue that the standards are so high that they would nullify the construction of any new plant, especially the provision controlling carbon dioxide releases at 1,000 pounds per megawatt hour.

Nearly every combined-cycled combustion natural gas turbine can meet that requirement. But no such coal unit can accomplish as much, as their average emission rate for carbon dioxide is 1,800 pounds for the same unit of output.

Does this serve the public? While coal interests have fought stricter emissions requirements, they have also been joining with the public sector to advance those technologies that are much more efficient than the older “pulverized” plants. Those processes will only get better, and may allow coal to both regain stature and to hedge against eventual higher natural gas prices.

“Never before has the EPA lumped coal and natural gas into one source category,” writes Senator Joe Manchin, D-WV, in an op-ed in the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail. “Put simply, the EPA regulations would require new coal-fired plants to be something they are not.” He is joined by three of his senate colleagues, who have asked President Obama to intervene.

The lawmakers are saying that the new standard should accommodate the progress now occurring. They are asking that those “super-critical” coal plants with higher efficiencies be allowed in the mix. Improved efficiencies mean that for each unit that is input into a burner, the resulting output is greater. That creates more energy and less pollution.

But those advanced coal generation technologies are expensive and may only be worth it if the nation attaches a price to carbon. Otherwise, it would be cheaper to build natural gas plants and particularly if the price of such fuel remains relatively low. Carbon capture and sequestration technologies, meanwhile, are not commercially viable and are at least a decade away from such deployment.

Critics are thus asking the obvious, which is why should consumers be forced to buy dirtier power that, for now, is the same price as competing fuels? That’s a fight that has taken place in Illinois, where Tenaska gave up on building a costly “coal gasification” facility that cleanses coal of its impurities. It has settled on a much cheaper gas plant.

Ditto for American Electric Power. It has chosen to hold off on building a pilot plant that would use carbon capture and sequestration technology. It estimated the cost to be $664 million, roughly half of which was to be paid by the U.S. Department of Energy. It cited the prevailing political landscape, noting that it would be unable to recover its expenses from ratepayers.

“So, even at its ‘highly efficient’ best, coal falls short of natural gas, which is far from clean,” says Dan Radmacher, communications director for the Appalachian Mountain Advocates, in response to Senator Manchin’s editorial. “Now, why, exactly, do you keep pushing this dirty fuel on the rest of America? It may have fueled the industrial revolution, but so did child labor. Times change, and so do standards.”

In an effort to keep an ailing sector alive, Senator Manchin says that the industry is committed to commercializing next-generation coal technologies. Jobs and fuel diversity are at stake, especially in his state that is plush with coal revenues.

But the acquiescent tone may not suffice: Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal and Peabody have all taken a thumping. Patriot Coal, spun off by Peabody in 2007, is in bankruptcy. All are active in Appalachia. And while those companies blame federal regulations for part of their woes, they acknowledge that a declining reserve base there in combination with abundant and inexpensive shale gas are also contributing to the new energy paradigm.

Indeed, Central Appalachia is rife with unconventional gas. The Marcellus Region that stretches down the East Coast is estimated to hold as much as 500 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. Penn State University says that such assets would create 200,000 jobs and the American Chemical Council says that 12,000 chemical-related jobs would be formed in West Virginia alone.

By comparison, the coal mining industry in all of Appalachia employs about 50,000 people, says the National Mining Association. As production falls there and as EPA regs kick in, that number will decline.

So is coal worth fighting for? Now that its political muscle is deteriorating, the industry wants to fully engage those who have sought to reform it. Regardless of the animus, it’s a conversation worth having. King Coal is now promising to make more investments in tomorrow’s technologies -- efforts that indicate it is being more conciliatory but ones that may still leave it breathless.